It has become quite common to find an electronic kiosk, or information center, in a public area such as a shopping mall or an amusement park. The stand-alone kiosk is designed to provide useful interactive information to the visitors and tourists. Other common types of kiosks are the automated teller machines (“ATM”), automated parking meters, vending machines and electronic airport ticketing stations at airport (“eTicket”). For the sake of simplicity, all such machines are referred to as the kiosk in the following description.
An electronic kiosk is almost always equipped with a number of electronic devices and peripheral units. For example, a typical kiosk may support one or more monitors, keyboards, printers, audio-visual units, all of which require power to operate. However, not all the peripheral units operate at the same power level, e.g. 5 VDC, 9 V DC, 12 V DC or 24 V DC. As such, a central power cord is typically connected to the kiosk, which in turn provides various levels of power for the peripherals through their respective power adaptors. Such implementation tends to generate a lot of messy and disorganized cables, as well as numerous bulky adaptor units, making maintenance and repair inconvenient.
Additionally, if any one of the peripherals crashes and hangs up during operation, it would require a reboot by turning it off and on. Rebooting the peripherals usually requires the act of a human operator. If no operator can get to the unit in time, the machine is out of commission and we will have a bunch of unhappy customers because they cannot use the kiosk for its intended purposes. A conventional power strip, such as the one made by Server Technology®, can only provide remote power access, without any efficient means of management. A conventional power strip such as the Server Technology provides only AC output with a single control, which is wholly inadequate for the complexity of modern power and control connection.
Therefore, it would be desirable to streamline and simplify the cabling arrangement at the electronic kiosk.
It would also be desirable to control the electronic kiosk remotely in the event of a crash, thus minimizing the need for human intervention.